Kevin Hardwick rightly asks, "But what about in Virginia? To my knowledge,
studies of white terrorism during reconstruction are thin on the ground for
Virginia."  The study we could look at is J. Douglass Smith's award-winning
"Managing White Supremacy: Race Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow
Virginia."  The state avoided violence because white Virginians found
non-violent ways to exclude blacks from the political process.  Smith writes
(p. 20) "Virginia became the only state of the former Confederacy to avoid
post-war military rule by agreeing to a new constitution in 1869 that
granted the suffrage to black men."  Smith then goes on the describe how the
suffrage was stripped away.  The Danville Riot played a role in that
process, but by and large the Democratic Party in Virginia didn't need to
resort to the rope, the lash, or the torch.  Great power can do nefarious
work by other means, such as restrictive voting laws and a fresh state
Constitution that undermined the 1869 document.  In this way the Democratic
Party managed to disenfranchise not only blacks, but poor whites as well.
Smith writes (26), "By the end of 1902, determined registrars and literacy
tests had eliminated all but 21,000 of an estimated 147,000 blacks of voting
age from registration lists; three years later the new poll tax cut that
number in half. The electorate was so thoroughly eviscerated that throughout
the first half of the twentieth century the Democratic Party regularly
elected its gubernatorial candidates with the support of less than 10
percent of the adult population."  In 1905 Governor Claude Swanson said, "We
have no Negro problem here. . . . The suffrage question has been determined
with justice and fairness and has ceased to be a subject of discussion or
agitation."  Indeed.

Henry Wiencek

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